The [1] has recently completed a 10-year project of data collection, at the household level, for the Census of 2021. The individual level data collection for the National Population Register is also to be uploaded next summer, alongside the Census.
As of January 2019, nearly 123 crore Aadhaar cards had been issued. In Parliament, recently, an exercise in counting was proposed, for a nationwide National Register of Citizens (NRC). While its predecessors were counting “residents” rather than “citizens”, the objective of this latest initiative is to count citizens — specifically to sift and sort citizens from non-citizens. This move is to include and exclude, and having done so to weed out “infiltrators” destined for detention camps and potential deportation.
The rationale for a nationwide NRC, its feasibility, and, above all, its moral legitimacy, is questionable. Under the Foreigners’ Act, [2], the burden of proof rests on the individual charged with being a foreigner.
Since the Citizenship Act provides no independent mechanism for identifying aliens — remember the Supreme Court struck down the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act, or IMDT Act, in 2005 — the NRC effectively places an entire population under suspicion of alienage. This is tantamount not only to using an elephant to crush an ant, but of torturing the elephant to do it.
The Assam NRC is reported to have cost ₹1,600 crore with 50,000 officials deployed to enroll almost 3.3 crore applicants in an exercise that even its champions acknowledge to be deeply flawed excluding 19 lakh people. On this basis, and taking as an indicative number the Indian electorate of 87.9 crore, a nationwide NRC would require an outlay of ₹4.26 lakh crore.
This is more than double the presumptive loss in the 2G scam, and four times the budgetary outlay for education this year. The work of “authenticating” 87.9 crore people would entail the deployment of 1.33 crore officials. In 2011-12 (the most recent official data available), the total number of government employees in India was 2.9 crore.
1) Which of the following has been redacted by [1]?
a. Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner
b. Office of Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs
c. Office of Registrar, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation
d. Office of Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs
2) Which ministry issue the Aadhaar card?
a. Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation
b. Ministry of Electronics and IT
c. Ministry of Home Affairs
d. Ministry of HRD
3) The NRC in Assam was last conducted in
a. 1951
b. 1953
c. 1955
d. 1971
4) Which of the following has been redacted by [2] ?
a. 1948
b. 1946
c. 1951
d. 1955
5) The cut off date for NRC in Assam is
a. 25 March 1971
b. 24 April 1987
c. 24 March 1971
d. 31 Dec 1971
